This series was succeeded by three others, in which the human interest is far greater, although they are not unmarked by fantastic invention; they were the Larger Passion of our Lord, a series of twelve cuts, including this impressive vignette (Fig. 41), Christ Suffering; the Life of the Virgin, a series of twenty cuts; and the Smaller Passion of our Lord (Figs. 42, 43), a series of thirty-six cuts, the vignette to which (Christ Mocked) is a design marvellous for its intensity, for its seizure of the malignant, mocking spirit in devilish possession of every lineament of the face and every muscle working in that sinuous gesture, for the ideal endurance in the Saviour’s attitude, which needs not those symbols of his sufferings beside him for pity, though Dürer’s genius must crowd every corner with thought and suggestion. These three great series were published about 1511, and were probably the work of the previous six years; they are full of force, and are characterized by tenderness of sympathy and fervor of devotion, as well as by the imaginative insight and power of thought which distinguish all his works. They quickly became popular; several editions were issued, and they were copied by more than one engraver, especially by the famous Italian, Marc Antonio Raimondi, who reproduced the Smaller Passion on copperplate. They marked an epoch in the history of wood-engraving. It is not possible to over-estimate the debt which the art owes Dürer, who thus suddenly and by his own artistic insight revealed the power and dignity which wood-engraving might attain, opened to it a great career, and was its first master in the era of its most splendid accomplishment. [Illustration: FIG. 43.--The Descent into Hell. From Dürer’s “Smaller Passion.”] Besides these connected series of woodcuts, many others, making in all three hundred and forty-seven, are attributed to Dürer; and of these one hundred and seventy are undoubtedly from his hand. They represent nearly all aspects of German life in the early sixteenth century, and, taken all together, afford a nearly complete picture of his time, not only in its general characteristics, but in detail. They show for the first time the power of wood-engraving to produce works of real artistic value, and its power to record faithfully the vast variety of contemporary life. Dürer was himself the highest product of the new freedom of individual development in the North, but his individuality gathered the age within itself, and became universal in knowledge and interest; so that he was not only the Reformer of German art and the greatest master in it, but was in a true sense the historian of the German Renaissance; it is to his works, and not least to his wood-engraving, that the student of that age must have recourse for the truest record of its thought and feeling at their best.